
t'i 




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V\ayo, A-D- 
T\ie ThtvJ Estate of the SoatK. 



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The Third Bstate of 
- the sSouth. 



An Address delivered before the American Social 

Science Association, at Saratoga, N.Y., 

Sept. 2d, 1890. 



Rev. a. D. MAYO, A.M. 



BOSTON 

GEORGE H. ELLIS, PRINTER, 14I FRANKLIN STREET 
1890 




2\0 



THE THIRD ESTATE OF THE SOUTH. 



From the beginning of the European settlement even to the 
present year of our Lord, the most prominent object of interest 
and observation in what we used to call the Southern States of this 
Republic has been the relation of the upper and under classes 
of Southern society, — the slaveholding Anglo-Saxon and the 
lately emancipated Negro. Not only abroad, but at home, it has 
scarcely entered into the calculations of statesmen and econo- 
mists that a great change in Southern affairs was impending that 
would bring another dominant class to the front. It was known 
that even in i860 there were six million of white people in these 
Southern States who had no immediate connection with slave- 
holding, and that a number of people, smaller than the present 
population of Boston, representing, possibly, a population of two 
million, comprised the ruling class. It was expected that this 
middle class would be felt in arresting the movement for seces- 
sion in 1 86 1. And I believe that a decided majority of these 
people had neither the desire nor intention of striking for a new 
nationality. But, with the exception of the action of West Vir- 
ginia and the stubborn loyalty of the mountain populations of 
the central South, this expectation was disappointed. We met 
these people on the battle-field through four dismal years, where 
they earned a reputation for good fighting which has made the 
name of an American soldiery illustrious. 

But now, like a mighty apparition across the Southern horizon, 
has arisen this hope or portent of the South, — the Third Estate, — 
to challenge the authority of the old ruling class, and place itself 
where the " plain people " of every Northern State was long ago 
established, as a decisive influence in public affairs. South Caro- 
lina, the head and front of the old South, is now swept by a politi- 
cal revolution as radical as the emancipation of the slaves in 1865. 
Texas, where the old order never got complete foothold, is now 
passing under the same control, so easily that it is not half-under- 
stood what weighty concerns are involved in the coming political 



movements of this growing Stace. Other States, especially on the 
Gulf, are rent by the same movement from below. It is evident 
that this is no surface or temporary affair. Its present political 
and financial theories will be largely modified by the rough disci- 
pline of responsible power. But the movement is in the line of 
American civilization, and, however checked or misdirected for 
the time, will finally prevail. 

The wise observer of Southern affairs will greatly mistake if he 
insists on the exclusive observation of the old conflict of races 
and the political condition of the Negro. For the coming decade, 
the place to watch the South is in this movement of the rising 
Third Estate. What it demands and what it can achieve in politi- 
cal, social, and industrial affairs; what changes can be wrought 
in itself by the great uplifting forces of American civilization, — 
by education, including the influence of the family, the Church, 
and the school, — on these things will depend the fate of this 
important section of our country for years to come. And on the 
outcome of this movement hangs the near future of the race ques- 
tion, — whether the swarming millions of colored citizens in these 
sixteen States will gradually reach their fit position in the body 
politic, or the whole South be plunged into the horrors of a race 
war, which will once more demand the strong arm of the nation to 
save that section from suicide. 

The present essay — the Third Estate of the South — is an 
honest attempt to give my own opinions concerning this, one of 
the most important movements in the history of the Republic. 
The assumption of infallible wisdom and the ventilation of whole- 
sale theories. North and South, in the discussion of Southern 
affairs, is the misery of our public life. A virtual residence of ten 
years in this region, including all the sixteen States, with good 
opportunities for observation, has deepened the impression that, 
of all the social and civic puzzles that confront the American 
Social Scientist and statesman, no knot is so tangled, so difficult 
to be undone, so dangerous to be cut by the sword, as this. 
To-day the South, as a section, has passed into a permanent 
minority of sixteen of the forty-four States. But it is still possible 
to array these States again in a conflict that would inflict a wound 
on the Southern member through which the Republic would bleed 
to death. It is "easy as preaching" to embroil and exasperate 
whole commonwealths, great classes and races, in a permanent 
misunderstanding that not even another Washington or Lincoln 



5 

could reconcile. Even as concerns the South itself, the question 
is one of vital interest. The spectacle of the five hundred thou- 
sand white people of South Carolina split into hostile clans by a 
political campaign now foaming on the ragged reef of violence is 
inexpressibly painful and discouraging. I shall not try to deal 
with this question by the ambitious methods of grand analysis, ab- 
stract theorizing, or inflated prophecy. If I can cast a little side- 
light upon this procession, as it moves on its twilight path, it may 
not be in vain that I occupy the time of the reader. 

In the European sense, there never was a Southern aristocracy. 
The descendants of the few European families of the favored class 
who drifted to the colonies never had a perceptible influence after 
the War of the Revolution. The abolition of all special privi- 
leges reduced the superior colonial class to the condition of the 
leading class in a republic of white men. There was a social 
" upper ten," in the original Southern Atlantic colonies, that held 
on indefinitely. But that largely disappeared, as a family affair, 
beyond the AUeghanies, where the new leading class made its way 
upward by personal power and solid service as certainly as in the 
North-western States. 

But, in the American political sense, there was and has been, up 
to the present time, a dominant class in this portion of the coun- 
try more powerful for all the issues of public life than any order 
of nobility in Europe since the French Revolution. It was, pri- 
marily, a combination of land-holders; practically, an aristocracy 
of the dollar. From the peculiar condition of the country and its 
monopoly of certain industrial products, the people of the South 
adopted and tied itself to the system of slave labor, cast off by the 
North as unprofitable, impolitic, and dangerous at the formation of 
the Republic. Whatever of anti-slavery sentiment — and there 
was a great deal — lingered in the early history of these States 
was swept down stream by the gathering tide of the dominating 
industrial and political interests. So it came to pass, in time, that 
a great combination of men, separated from each other by abysses 
of social, religious, and educational repulsions, found common 
cause in the protection of slavery in the old and its introduction to 
the new Southern and South-western States. The diaries and 
correspondence of Judge Story and John Quincy Adams, during 
their early years in Washington, are full of this observation of the 
formidable power of this combination, — its skilful handling of 
Congress, its invariable success in every conflict with a half-con- 
scious and divided North. 



And, without indorsing the exaggerated rhetoric of our Southern 
college Commencements concerning the splendor of this class 
during " the Golden Age " of Southern, society, we may grant to 
this combination the praise of remarkable ability and, on some 
lines, of broad foresight in national affairs. It was composed 
almost wholly of the ablest, most politic and persistent class in 
modern history, — the British upper-middle class, — modified by 
the influences and interests of its peculiar position on the edge of 
Christendom. It made all things subordinate to the chief end of 
favoring the Southern ambition to become the ruling power of the 
country. The professional classes became its spokesmen and 
allies. The leisure of its landed proprietors fostered a universal 
ambition among its young men for political activity as the be-all 
and end-all of life. Its schools were a reproduction of the British 
I system of education a century ago, — universities, colleges, and 
academies for the upper white class, more completely under the 
administration of the Protestant clergy than the schools of Cath- 
olic Europe are now under the control of that astute priesthood, 
well adjusted to lift up the promising youth below to companion- 
ship with his betters, and elbow off the "common herd" into a 
wide-spread illiteracy. Its women, among the most brilliant and 
capable in the world, were no such tribe of imbeciles and idlers as 
we fancied in the North. The Southern matron in her plantation 
life was one of the most overtaxed and devoted working women of 
her sex. Outside this domain female culture gravitated to the 
social ability which gave her the lead at Washington, and till a 
late period made her the nation's best social foot put foremost on 
the shores of Europe. 

^ This political aristocracy, in all vital affairs, governed the Repub- 
lic till it was moved to rise up and divide the nation in 1861. It 
instigated and brought on the condition of war against the In- 
dians, Great Britain, and Mexico, by which the country was dis- 
tracted through its first seventy years. It was the author of the 
magnificent scheme of the expansion of territory which gave us 
the empire of Louisiana, Florida, Texas, the Pacific Coast, — all 
the additions to our territory except the latest purchase, Alaska. 
It led in the settlement of the West, following the sagacious policy 
of Washington, whose eye was always glancing over to the wilder- 
ness beyond the Alleghanies. Tennessee and Kentucky were in 
a blaze of Indian border war, while the North-west slumbered 
almost undisturbed. 



It is difficult to understand why a class so able and astute in 
many ways was led on to the hazardous experiment of dividing the 
Union in i860. With the Constitution on its side, with an indefi- 
nite power of Congressional obstruction, it could have kept slavery 
for a long generation, and made the country pay the cost of a 
modified system of emancipation. The reasons seem to be found 
in the absorption of a powerful society, engrossed in the work of 
self-preservation, in a strangely isolated position. Pushed off to 
the border of civilization with only a half barbarous Mexico and a 
boundless wilderness on the South-west, and a vast and lonely sea- 
board all around, shut off by its own theory and purpose from 
contact with the rising tide of progressive modern life, its literary, 
professional, and social influences all captured and held in subjec- 
tion by the political intolerance which is the most unrelenting form 
of tyranny, it was not strange that its group of accomplished 
statesmen fell into the delusion, not only of their own sectional 
invincibility, but honestly believed that their political allies in the 
North would, in the last event, consent to their demand of virtual 
permanent control of the general government, or a separation on 
sectional lines. A distinguished citizen of Boston, during the sum- 
mer preceding Mr. Lincoln's election, was for a time in daily confi- 
dential communication with Jefferson Davis. He reports that he 
found his distinguished acquaintance completely possessed with 
the idea of the military and civic superiority of the South, and the 
willingness of the dominant party in the North to consent to what- 
ever it should demand. 

How this came out we all know. The world has acknowledged 
the prodigious ability and matchless devotion with which the 
dominant class went through this desperate programme, to the 
terrible end of its own destruction. Its military commanders have 
furnished many forcible and picturesque and one noble figure to 
''' American history. Its statesmanship, now disparaged, was proba- 
bly as competent as a cause so at odds with the trend of modern 
civilization would admit. But we do not yet recognize fairly the 
great services rendered to the South and the nation, later on, by 
this class, even in the demoralized state in which it was left by the 
Vwar, when not one in ten of its families was found upon or has 
since stood on a solid financial footing. Its young men were scat- 
tered to the South-west, to the North-west, to the growing cities, 
leaving the open country in charge of a class that, in the old time,^, 
had little influence in affairs. Its women gathered up the wrecks 



8 

of a great destruction, in true American style; and to-day the 
young women of the better sort of Southern families are the hope 
of the country, rehabilitating the homes, the soul of the Church, 
the best school-teachers, the leaders in the temperance reform, on 
the lookout for all industrial opportunities that can be used. 

The leaders in the war naturally became the leaders of recon- 
struction politics. And, whatever may be the verdict of history 
concerning the way in which the eleven ex-Confederate States 
have been placed in line to receive a share of the progressive life 
of the country, the display of ability has fully borne out their old 
reputation. The South to-day owes about all it has of order and 
law, the common school for all classes and both races, the restora- 
tion of its religious and educational affairs, to the administration of 
this class. The great obstacle to the progress of the Negro is 
not his old master class ; for among these people are often found 
the wisest and most Christian views concerning the development 
of their old bondmen, and an amount of personal sacrifice and 
patience that only a constant observer can appreciate. I do not 
know what New Boston, with her five hundred thousand people, 
would do if suddenly overwhelmed by an avalanche of the seven 
hundred thousand South Carolina negroes, marshalled by our 
redoubtable friend. General B. F. Butler, in a solid colored con- 
tingent, to capture the city government, administer its vast inter- 
ests, handle its twenty million debt, and, in public affairs, repre- 
sent it to the world. I fancy the " weight of the meeting " would 
there prevail, by some of the numerous methods by which an 
Anglo-Saxon community everywhere, in the end, manages to put 
inferiority on the back seat and land the management of vital 
affairs in the upper story. 

But it was inevitable that this long lease of power by the South- 
ern dominant class should come to an end. In New England and 
New York, the aristocratic States of the old North, this change 
was gradually wrought, — by the educational influences that pre- 
pared the humbler classes, native or foreign born, for the responsi- 
bilities of power. Eighty-five per cent, of the men worth a hun- 
dred thousand dollars or more, in these States, began with noth-^ 
ing but this outfit. But in the South the progress of the Third 
Estate has been slow : indeed, until the past twenty years, it had 
hardly begun. But all things hasten, even in the piney woods or 
mountain realms of our Southland ; and now, under the simple 
name of a " Farmers' Alliance," this mighty army of the common 



people has been revealed, like a frowning mountain world uncov- 
ered by a rising mist. Already it may be predicted that the old 
order, as far as it depended on the European qualities of family 
and class training, has gone by. Hereafter, the South follows the 
North in the rush to the front of the fittest who survive. And the 
contest for place will be on industrial lines there as here. 

For a time to come I believe the Negro question is to be held 
in partial subordination by this great uprising of the Third Estate. 
Certain it is that the attempt to lift the Negro citizenship of the 
South out of its natural place, the rear column of its civilization, 
will be a stupendous blunder. The child in a family, however 
bright and promising, can only play at being the equal of his 
elders ; though he can make a big disturbance, break the har- 
mony, and mar the peace of the household. To suppose that 
eight millions of citizens, in the condition of our Southern 
Negroes, twenty-five years out of personal slavery, can by any de- 
vice be wrenched from their present position and shot ahead of 
the twelve millions of plain white people who have been on the 
ground for two hundred years, and must become the dominant 
power of the South for generations to come, is only to indulge in 
the dream of an enthusiast. ^ 

But whether the white man of the Third Estate can rid himself 
of the old theories of race and caste, and adopt the American idea 
that all men shall be fairly tested by what they can do, depends 
on many contingencies. Is it possible or probable, in a period 
sufficiently brief to avoid the danger of a disastrous race conflict, 
that this vast constituency can be brought over to the practical 
American view of giving to every child the great American chance 
in life ? I do not know. But I greatly hope ; and the sources of 
my hope, or some of them, I now declare. 

When the history of the South descends from the realm of 
romance, where it still lingers, to the solid ground of fact, it will 
be seen how absurd everywhere outside the domain of legend is 
the impression of a radical difference between its original popula- 
tion and the old North-east. Nobody pretends that the South- 
west, beyond the AUeghanies, was peopled by a line of "gentler" 
descent than the North-west. About all the South had to show 
in Revolutionary days of great statesmanship and eminent patriot- 
ism was, like the similar class in the North, a descent from the 
respectable middle estate of Great Britain. But, when we turn 



10 

to the Third Estate, — always the majority, and now rising to the 
head and front of the new South, — we find the source of its 
power, as in the North, in the mixture of populations from a dozen 
sorts of vigorous European people. The Catholic Churchman and 
dissenting Englishman of various social degrees, the Scotch and 
North Irish Protestant, the early German of the Valley of Vir- 
ginia, the Huguenot of South Carolina, the Highlander, Hebrew, 
and other miscellany of old Georgia, the Creole, Frenchman, and 
Spaniard, in Louisiana, all went into the seething cauldron of the 
early colonial life. Up to a generation before the war came in 
■a steady immigration of excellent people from New England and 
the Middle States. I rarely visit a town in the five old Atlantic 
-commonwealths that I do not find the descendants of these peo- 
ple, — always glad to renew the old-time associations with home. 
The accident of a change of residence alone prevented the Rhetts 
of South Carolina from being a Boston, and the later Winthrops 
of Massachusetts a Charleston, family. Along with this uniformly 

^good stock drifted in at an early date a baser element, brought to 
the colonies on indenture, — the lower sort of the English cities, 
whose descendants even now in Maryland and Delaware rank 

.low in the social scale. The growing power of slavery intensified 
the separation of the respectable sort from the common lot. The 
illiteracy of whole regions of the country wrought its perfect work 
in the "poor white trash," — resembling the Northern tramp, — 
except that he is not only too shiftless to work, but too lazy to 
tramp. 

How the strange population of the great central mountain world 
— near two millions at present — was formed nobody seems to 
know. This region was a mysterious *' no-man's-land " till the 
enterprise of the last twenty-five years revealed it, with all its 
natural sublimity and beauty and its industrial importance, to an 
astonished world. Perhaps from the Revolutionary Tories of the 
adjacent States, from criminals, outcasts, eccentrics, and broken- 
down people in general, with a sprinkling of more ambitious 
blood, was made up that people which, even now, seen among the 
mountains overlooking the valley of Virginia, but better observed 
in East Kentucky, Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and 
Northern Georgia, sends forth a louder cry for the missionary of 
civilization than any portion of the Republic. 

So far as variety of material is concerned, the old colonial 
South had an equal mixture of blood with the old North. Of late 



II 

the trend of European immigration has not taken a Southern 
direction, and the per cent, of foreign-born population in all the 
Southern States east of the Mississippi is very small. A most 
interesting fact for the historical inquirer is the explanation of the 
origin of the Southern white people, and the romance of the reality 
will eclipse the glamour of rhetorical mist in which the origin of 
this section has been involved. 

So it has come about that the present population of this grade 
in the South is far more homogeneous than in the North. The 
rough training of the pioneer life welded these various elements 
into one people. Even the Louisiana Creole is yielding. A lead- 
ing merchant of New Iberia, the heart of the Teche district, told 
me that twenty years ago only one in five of his country customers 
attempted to speak English ; while now only one in five is com- 
pelled to trade in French. A brisk colony in the North-west has 
invaded the prairies of South-western Louisiana ; and a Congrega- 
tional College, with a Yankee President, is established on the old 
domain of the Padres. Yet there are still great differences in 
education and efficiency in the different elements of this people. 
The coast country, including the immense piney woods empire, 
still produces a considerable population of a sort less hopeful than 
any other of whatsoever " previous condition." The lovely Pied- 
mont region, surrounding the great central mountain realm of the 
old South, has a farming population greatly resembling the New 
England country people of my boyhood. The States beyond the 
Mississippi — Missouri, Western Arkansas, and Texas, the new 
South-west — have received more immigration since the war than 
all the rest of the South : of the best and common sort of its 
own ; somewhat from abroad ; from the North-west, whose people 
seem inclined to edge down into a milder clime ; perhaps also a 
considerable return wave from the crowd that settled Southern 
Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana in bygone days. It is said a million 
young men from the Southern country districts have gone to the 
cities, the North-west and the South-west, since 1865. They have 
left on the ground, in some portions of the old South, a white 
population, so far as the men are concerned, inferior to the old- 
time occupants, — less capable of reclaiming the country, less in- 
clined to deal fairly with the colored folk. 

But it is almost hopeless to draw a diagram of the Southern 
Third Estate as it now exists. Nobody, even to the "manner 
born," can do it to the satisfaction of the Southern people ; for 



12 

the pride of State, locality, sect, and social condition — what Mr. 
Breckinridge calls " the provincial flavor " — are " solid " against 
any decided estimate of matters so delicate. Before the war, 
lines were more sharply drawn. While alert to capture and lift 
up to companionship and position the rising talent of the lower 
class, the old-time ruling set drew hard and fast lines between 
themselves and the ordinary non-slave-holding people. My first 
experience of South Carolina was in 1856, — in a stage-coach 
bound for the Catskill Mountain House, New York, filled with a 
brilliant Charleston group, chiefly ladies. Completely ignoring 
my presence, the only man of the company entertained his fair 
companions all the way up by his adventures on a tour through 
the upper counties of " his nation," talking of the people there, 
amid peals of laughter, in a way that reminded one of Dr. John- 
son and the literati of London a century ago, defining a Scotch- 
man as *' a good fellow, if caught early." Till the war, a property 
condition of representation in the South Carolina legislature gave 
a power to the lowland slaveholders which was used in a way that 
has come back to plague the commonwealth in the new upheaval 
of affairs. 

'« The Civil War was the great university of the lower masses of 
the Southern white people. The Grand Army caught them up in 
its all-enclosing net ; locked them up in its fierce conscription ; 
marched them all over their own country, with occasional visits to 
Northland, outside and inside a Union prison camp. To a people 
so preternaturally eager to see and hear and talk, this was a God- 
send, — the beginning of the blessing that has come to the South- 
ern poor white man equally with his colored brother from the 
collapse of the Rebellion. The break-up of the old estates, espe- 
cially in the Gulf region, brought large numbers of these people 
down to the lowlands as owners of farms. The opening up of 
Central Florida sent a wave of immigration from the piney woods 
people that still contests the Northern and Western occupation. 
The mighty development of the railroad system has remanded the 
coast country of the Atlantic and Gulf to a secondary place, and 
brought up the Piedmont region, in which a large number of 
thriving towns have arisen, and which, with the mining and timber 
lands, is the seat of the new Southern prosperity. The new South- 
west is growing almost as fast as the new North-west, — an excep- 
tion to the old South, outside of special districts. 

The marvellous growth in the South, of which we hear so much, 



13 

is largely a development of the mining country bordering the 
mountains, where a number of new towns have sprung up and 
capital is being invested ; the lumber country and special agricult- 
ural districts. But much of the old landed realm is still in no con- 
dition to be rejoiced over. There are more people at work than of 
old, black and white. The division of farms has stimulated produc- 
tion. In certain quarters, skilled agriculture is taking the place of 
the old-time fumbling with the soil. New fields in Florida, Missis- 
sippi, and Texas are opening for the culture of cotton, fruits, truck, 
and staples. The country people are living somewhat better than 
ten years ago. But the intolerable "lien system," whereby the 
town merchant practically owns the land and enslaves its occu- 
pants, is a dispensation such as afflicts no large body of civilized 
people besides in our country. How multitudes of good folk can 
live at all under such a systematic plunder is only accounted for 
by their moderate demands for living and the impossibility of get- 
ting out of the deadlock alive. The attempt of a class of South- 
ern politicians, in the interest of their pet economic theories, to 
compare the condition of this portion of their people with that of 
the farmers of New England and the established portion of the 
West is simply ludicrous to an observer of the different portions 
of the country. More than half the people in whole regions of 
the South outside the better class in the cities are compelled to 
live in a way that is unknown in these States, except to the lower 
class of the foreign-born, with little outlook for better times. But 
this country is capable of recuperation by capital, skill, and espe- 
cially the occupation of small farms by industrious and thrifty 
people. In time, the better class of the Negroes will come into 
possession of a great deal of this open country and reclaim it. 

It would greatly change the Northern estimate of Southern 
affairs, could the fact be understood that confronts the traveller 
through the length and breadth of the Southland, — that through 
vast regions, even of the older States, the people are living under 
the conditions of a border civilization. Not a border country in 
the sense of our new Western frontier, — a vanishing " out into the 
West," with a furious civilization, armed to the teeth with all the 
implements of modern progress on its heels. Not the terrible 
border life that railroad extension and the mining boom make in 
the new villages extemporized in a howling Southern wilderness. 
Hundreds of these new towns in the South, where the iron horse 
reins up and the great steam leviathan wheels round, are a refuge 



for the drift and diabolism of the whole surrounding country, 
which appears regularly, on " dress parade," in the new city. One 
little metropolis of this sort in East Tennessee has enjoyed the 
luxury of a hundred murders since it was struck by the *' boom." 
But this is the old-time border life, where people lived far away 
from each other and the world, with meagre privilege of travel, 
rarely used, the only town the county seat, and that not -often 
visited. Here is developed an obstinate type of personal inde- 
pendence that stands out, like the iron handle of the town pump, 
in either sex. But what is not done that can be done in such a 
life ? The man attends to his own little world ; defends himself 
as best he can against wild creatures and wilder men; makes a 
sharp practical code of the neighborhood, that underlies the law 
of the land, and is administered far more thoroughly than the 
latter. These populations, once polarized by the plantation fam- 
ilies, which made a centre of superior living, are now often left 
adrift by the decay of this class and the breaking up of the old 
order generally. The census of Virginia in 1880 showed not a 
quarter of a million of her people, even in villages. And, although 
the growth of what are called " cities " has been more marked 
during the past ten years, yet, outside of occasional districts, the 
vast majority of the Southern white people live in an all-out-of- 
doors style, not easily understood in the crowded communities of 
the old East and large portions even of the new West. 

While this sphere of life is favorable to some of the primitive 
virtues, — hospitality, good feeling, and sociability, — and to the 
absence of some of the vices of great cities, yet the dearth of the 
agencies of the higher civilization is a fact almost incredible, 
unless experienced. Even Texas, the most prosperous Southern 
State, has yet no system of roads ; and only three thousand of her 
eight thousand country schools have a school-house over their 
heads. The appalling loneliness of the vast "Lone Star" Em- 
pire has already driven more than a third of its people into vil- 
lages and cities. But, in the older States, a full half of the people 
of both races live outside the opportunities for schooling, read- 
ing, churching, and the use of a tolerable press, — most of the 
modern agencies of social uplifting that are the commonplace of 
the North. The South, in winter, outside the towns, lies under 
a fearful embargo of mud, which shuts up the people to such a 
home life as can be enjoyed under the circumstances. The aver- 
age country school does not last a full four months, is placed at 



15 

inconvenient distances, often kept in an unfit school-house, — a 
peril to the health of the children of the poorer people. Less 
than sixty per cent, of Southern children in the open country, 
where three-fourths their whole number live, represents the aver- 
age attendance on school less than four months in the year. 
Probably not a hundred " cities " of the South now have a free 
library, or a good circulating library accessible to the masses 
of the white people. The city daily journals have a limited cir- 
culation away from the towns and railroads; and the country 
press is too often, at best, feeble and misleading. Thousands 
of people do not read that, but depend upon common report for 
news. The significance of the Scripture phrase — "wars and 
rumors of wars" — is apparent in a community largely dependent 
upon rumor and what the popular leaders choose to tell of public 
affairs. A considerable portion of middle-aged men are of the 
class that obtained little or no schooling during the war and the 
ten succeeding years, and have come up, a degenerate race from 
their parents, to shoulder the weighty responsibilities of the pres- 
ent. Here is the seat of the Negrophobia that often blazes out 
into violence and outrage. It is not the deliberate purpose or 
feeling of the better class of the Southern people, but the inevi- 
table result of the friction between the races, where a considerable 
element of the dominant race is so removed from the higher influ- 
ences of American life. 

Yet the vast majority of this great population is of "native 
American" birth, and is all the time affected by the training- 
school of American life. The political speakers and preachers, 
the visit to the county town, the coming and going of the emigrat- 
ing youth, the temperance agitation, the yearly revival meeting, the 
" boom," that is heard a great way off, like the thundering oncom- 
ing of the chariot of the Sun, the awakening eagerness to make 
money, which Dr. Johnson pronounced " about the best thing an- 
honest man can do," — all these influences keep the drowsiest realm 
somewhat astir, and form a sort of education to several millions of 
these people, — on the whole, better than schools without common 
sense. Even the mountain world is stirred to its silent depths. 
Twenty-five years hence, the class of people described in Miss 
Murfree's novels may be as difficult to locate as the bison of the 
Western prairies. 

I rode a whole day, in South Carolina, with the son of an old 
Connecticut River railroad president, who was stumping the region 



i6 

along the line from Charleston, S.C., to the Ohio River, soliciting 
grants of money and land for the route that will give the shortest 
access to the ocean from the North-west. A dozen great lines of 
travel are penetrating this marvellous wilderness, so long an 
enchanted land in the heart of the old Republic. In half a cen- 
tury, this section of mountain country will become one of the 
most attractive portions of the United States, — much of it more 
fit for occupation and agreeable in climate than a good deal of 
New England. These mountain people were loyal in the late war. 
Wherever the Union army penetrated, they fell in with vim. A 
hundred and forty thousand white soldiers were enlisted from this 
country, — twenty-four thousand more than from Vermont, New 
Hampshire, and Connecticut, seven thousand more than from 
nine of the present North-western States. Eastern Kentucky gave 
more white soldiers to the Union army than its entire number of 
voters. 

In short, the Third Estate of the South is chiefly of good 
original stock, though for two hundred years content to sit on the 
back seat and rise up at the call of a superior class. But that 
drama is well on toward the fifth act. Radically sound, good- 
natured, energetic, looking in with all its eyes at the great, wide- 
open front door of the new American life, with the first enjoyment 
of the common school and the hunger and thirst for more ; hear- 
ing, afar off, the loud sound of the " forging ahead " of the grand 
new South, earnest and devout in religious faith, — here is a 
material for American citizenship such as nowhere else can be 
found in this world. We may well consider what a conservative 
force in national affairs is here in training, — only needing the 
education of the time to bring to the front a people that will close 
up with the best elements of the Republic and " hold the fort " of 
an Anglo-Saxon, progressive civilization against all raids from 
home or abroad. 

What can be done by the whole country to aid in the evolution 
of this people in the Southland ? How can this great uprising be 
so directed that justice will be done, — not only to its superior class, 
which it will gradually displace and reconstruct, but to the eight 
millions of colored folk alongside of which it must live t 

The first condition of social advancement is an understanding 
of the favorable elements in the problem. Even the "less 
favored " of this great population, the higher strata of which are 
well up, have several characteristics that deserve mention. 



17 

First, this body of the Southern people is not hopelessly com- 
mitted to the fixed theories concerning government, social arrange- 
ments, and American affairs in general, which thirty years ago 
opened the " bloody chasm " we are all trying to fill up to-day. 
The exaggerated ideas of State sovereignty, the antiquated philos- 
ophy of eternal race distinction, the prejudice against modern 
ideas of education and industrial matters, which characterized the 
old leading class and still somewhat affect its rising generation^ 
are not "to the manner born " with them. Indeed, a new State of 
the Union was formed in 1862 from the breaking out from these 
ideas by an important district of the Old Dominion. That the 
masses of the South have followed the leading exponents of these 
views, even through the destruction of civil war, is not decisive^ 
since there had been little open discussion of such matters among 
them previous to i860. But there are significant indications that, 
wherever the broader American ideas are fairly presented, without 
partisan or sectional animus, there will be found, in this quarter, a 
hearing that prophesies a hopeful future. The eagerness with 
which the country people have turned to the common school, — the, 
special anathema of the old order in the old time, — and now for 
twenty years have supported it, bearing the chief burden of its 
colored department, almost to their full ability, and the constant 
demand for its improvement, is a case in point. Coeducation of 
Southern boys and girls has always been unpopular in respectable 
Southern circles ; but in the common schools it is well-nigh uni- 
versal, and is now introduced in the State Universities of three 
States. At the Miller Manual Labor School in Virginia, under the 
shadow of the University, four hundred youth of the humbler white 
class are schooled together, with a respect for womanhood worthy 
the higher ideal of the chivalry that interprets the Golden Rule. 
The special horror of the Southern upper class is the education of 
the colored and white races together. But at Berea, on the edge 
of Old Blue-Grass Kentucky, I found one of the best collegiate 
institutions of that State, where a large number of white mountain 
boys and girls were " improving their minds," and making man- 
hood and womanhood, with a third as many lowland Negroes, with 
absolutely no friction. Of course, the old-time notions concerning 
labor have passed out of sight of this, the rising industrial class of 
the South. I ddl|kilow what poUtical policy or party in national 
affairs is to prevairin the future. But I am sure that another 
twenty years of fair opportunity to present the broad-gauge Amer- 



i8 

ican idea of affairs to this people would result in a state of opinion 
that would leave the country safe, whatever party might dispense 
official "pie" at Washington. 

Second, I believe in this people will be found a mine of enthu- 
siastic and intelligent patriotism. The war against the Union was 
not an uprising of the Southern masses, but a deliberate policy of 
the class that had its confidence, — never seriously contemplated 
by three-fourths of the Southern people. Once in, they fought, as 
American men always do when that is the business on hand. But, 
long before the bitter end, it was understood that the hearts of 
great numbers of the Confederate soldiery were no longer in the 
cause. I was informed by a distinguished gentleman in Richmond 
that months before the end, on a tour through the mountains of 
Virginia, he met great numbers of deserters and disaffected people 
who did not propose longer to fight for a cause that boded so little 
good for their kind. The non-slaveholding class has no such 
prejudice against the Negro as the master class : indeed, this preju- 
dice is far more a repulsion of caste and a memory of " previous 
condition" than a theory of race. They do not especially love the 
Negro : the lower strata look upon him as a dangerous rival in 
many ways. But it will not need a miraculous conversion to con- 
vince them that the welfare of an American State consists in stand- 
ing by equal rights, justice, and fair play all round, leaving vexed 
questions of social import to regulate themselves, as they invari 
ably will. 

Third, another special trait that has attracted my attention 
from the first is the teachableness of the children of this class, with 
a reverence for superiors and confidence in those they believe 
friendly and unselfish. There is no better material than great 
numbers of these youth for the natural methods of teaching, which 
wake up the desire for improvement, spite of untrained manners 
and habits of living. I live among boys and girls who are making 
such efforts to gain a scrap of the opportunity so bountifully flung 
into the streets before all the children of our Northern cities as 
makes this one of the most pathetic spectacles of American life. 
All the stories that have thrilled the churches of the North con- 
cerning the eagerness for knowledge of the young Negro can be 
paralleled among the children and youth of the humbler white 
class, with the important difference that the average white child 
of Anglo-Saxon parentage, even of illiterate descent, seems to have 
at the bottom of his mind a pair of pincers by which he takes fast 



19 

hold of what goes in, and generally reveals the power of heredity 
in a people for centuries the leaders of the progressiv^e society of 
the world. 

All these and other elements of hopefulness encourage the 
apostle of the new American life in his dealing with the most 
needy of this class, and insure the hearty co-operation of the 
upper strata. And, now, what can the North and the nation do 
to hasten the coming of this great uprising among twelve millions 
of white American people, on whose future relations to American 
ideas the fate of these great commonwealths depends ? 

First, it can aid, in all public and private ways, to put on the 
ground a good working system of country common schools, of at 
least six months' duration a year, where all children can receive 
the elements of education, with the moral and social discipline 
which is " half the battle " in the training for American citizenship. 
As fast as the simple elements of industrial training can be im- 
parted, it will be well. But the great need of the Third Estate 
youngster of the South is a revival of brains that will open his 
eyes to the wide world outside the home lot and form a habit of 
good reading and sound thinking on what is ahead of him. That 
itself will be a great industrial uplift, and in time revolutionize 
the methods of unskilled labor which are the chief hindrance to 
Southern advancement in material things. I still hold to the 
deliberate opinion that the country people of the South are doing 
about all they can for their common schools. Special districts 
will be able to approach the cities and villages in their ability for 
local taxation. But for two hundred years the common people of 
the South have been taught that " taxation is tyranny," and that 
"economy," even pushed to public stinginess, is the ideal of good 
government. Even were this pestilent heresy exploded, and the 
people convinced that wise and generous taxation is the life-blood 
of Republican society, — since, of all things, American civilization 
is the most expensive in the outlay, though the most economical 
in the income, — the power to bear taxation for putting on the 
ground the vast educational plant required for the white and 
colored schools, chiefly at the expense of the white population, 
burdened as at present, is not there. The persistent denial of 
this fact by a portion of the Northern metropolitan press, in the 
interest of the land agents and the investors in Southern capital, 
has gone far to publish a report that Dr. Curry pronounces a " stu- 
pendous humbug." 



20 

To my mind, the defeat of the Senate bill for National Aid to- 
Education, last winter, was such a mistake that, could it be 
fathered on either party, it would entitle that combination to a re- 
tirement from power for a quarter of a century, on the ground of 
political incapacity. No critic of New England, however malig- 
nant, has drawn a bill of impeachment of Yankee statesmanship 
so formidable as was furnished by the votes of five New England 
Senators that accomplished that defeat, representing three States 
that lead the Union in the enjoyment of educational opportunities. 
A cause so manifestly just and wise and essential to Southern 
progress as some form of national aid for the time needed to put 
the educational affairs of these commonwealths on their feet is 
sure to come up for renewed action. The bill of the venerable 
Senator Morrill, for additional aid to agricultural colleges, includ- 
ing those for colored people, which has passed both Houses of 
Congress, is fraught with positive good. These schools are among 
the most valuable in the South, especially for the youth of the 
poorer classes. With the re-enforcement of fifteen thousand to 
twenty-five thousand dollars a year, they can be greatly improved,, 
becoming everywhere, as they have become in Mississippi and 
Texas, an important element in the movement for skilled labor for 
all people. A generous system of national aid for education, 
administered, as it could and would have been, by the State edu- 
cational authorities established at the close of the war, would 
have saved us from the bitter antagonisms awakened by the elec- 
tion bills of the present day. Said a radical politician to William 
H. Seward concerning the fugitive slave law, — one of the most 
mischievous ever enacted by Congress, — " What would you have 
done, as President of the United States, had that bill come up to 
you from Congress ? " " If I had been President of the United 
States, that bill would never have reached the White House." 
The statesmanship that will save our country is that which works 
at long range, on the lines of the great uplifting agencies of civili- 
zation, in hope of gradual and permanent advancement, dispens- 
ing, as far as may be, with the old bungling rule of the sword and 
constable beyond the line of personal disobedience of the law. 

Third, industrial education, in its broadest and most practical 
form, with good schooling in the elements of English, must be- 
come a great factor in the uplift of the new South. All the argu- 
ments used for its application to the Negro have full application 
to the children and youth of the Third Estate. Especially is this 



21 

true of the young women of this class. The lower forms of 
woman's work, with an increasing push into the operative and 
other modes of profitable labor, are falling into the hands of the 
colored women. Large numbers of these girls, in the excellent 
industrial mission schools of the South, are becoming successful 
workers in a variety of occupations for women. Whether the 
white girl of the South is to "lie off" and "play lady," while her 
colored sister "toils and spins," or take her part in the rising 
sphere of profitable industry, the three hundred and fifty ways 
by which an American woman can get a respectable living, is to 
be decided by this movement for the training of the hand of the 
rising womanhood of the South. Several of the Southern States 
already admit girls to the agricultural colleges. But the Mis- 
sissippi plan seems the most popular. This State supports a great 
Industrial and Normal School, with free tuition for white girls, — 
a sort of college " of all work," where a young woman can get a 
good academical education and be trained for teaching while com- 
pelled to take some branch of industrial training. Though some- 
what hindered by political interference in its administration, this 
school is becoming a positive success, and reflects great credit 
on a group of admirable women who pushed it through the legis- 
lature, and are still watching by its cradle. Georgia is about to 
establish a similar school at her old capital, Milledgeville. The 
plan is so feasible that I look to its establishment in all these 
States. 

Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, the foremost educational and re- 
ligious leader of the whole Southern people, has inaugurated his 
elevation to a bishopric in the Methodist Church, South, by a 
wise and noble plan for a great school of a similar class for South- 
ern white girls, in the Alabama mining country, on the border 
between "down South" and the North, where the daughters of the 
impoverished rich and the ambitious poor can be educated at a 
rate that will enable thousands of good girls to obtain their great 
and only chance for education. The next million that goes down 
that way from Northern benevolence should be given to Bishop 
Haygood, in whose hands the vanishing surplus of the United 
States Treasury would have been wisely invested in "the building 
for the children " of the people of all conditions in these States. 
It is one of the delusions that still abide in too many minds that 
the great industrial need of the South is cheap and unskilled labor, 
the toil of an ignorant peasantry. The desperate need of the 



22 

South is intelligent labor in the masses, under the leadership of 
trained commanders of industry, — an army that will go forth 
"conquering and to conquer," into this marvellous world of op- 
portunity. 

The white masses of the South need to be brought in range of 
that system of agencies of the higher American civilization now 
in operation even in the most remote North-west, and which are 
the glory of the more prosperous States. It is impossible to de- 
scribe the difference in the mental atmosphere in which a bright 
boy or girl, in an average county in South Carolina, Alabama, or 
Louisiana, is brought up, and that amid which his cousin lives, in 
Massachusetts, Ohio, or Wisconsin. It is all the difference be- 
tween living in a country where the whole environment is educa- 
tional and a country where education is a special thing and the 
youth is, all the time, compelled to push out of his ordinary sur- 
roundings to gain it. A free library in every neighborhood, a 
better class of newspapers, a movement to " add to faith knowl- 
edge " in the church, — all these, now rapidly coming to the front 
in the prosperous cities, still wait for their day in the open coun- 
try. Yet here is the place, almost the only place left in Ameri- 
can life, where is yet leisure from engrossing work. Oh, what a 
boon to us hurried and wearied mortals would be that precious 
leisure, flowing like a great quiet river through these rural districts 
of the Southland! Here is the place where all these beautiful 
and beneficent agencies would be best appreciated by the chil- 
dren and youth, who would accept them as eagerly as the children 
of New England, fifty years ago ; springing to them as to a boun- 
teous feast. 

And is not the group of men and women already known who 
can bring the philosophy of Social Science down from heaven to 
abide upon earth, and put into simple statement, in leaflets or 
short readable tracts, the knowledge that makes for good living 
and true prosperity ? The South is now drugged with the theories 
of professional politicians. Now the tariff, now the Negro, now 
the railroad, now the distant millionaire, is paraded up and down 
as the cause of " agricultural depression," the source of all South- 
ern woes. Now let the Social Scientists "take an inning," and 
tell the people what wasteful housekeeping, bad cookery, unskilled 
labor, unfit dress, ignorance, superstition, shiftlessness, vulgarity, 
and vice have to do with the undeniable trials of these, with other 
multitudes of the less favored of our American people. A rail- 



23 

road conductor, with a big head on his shoulders, said to me : 
" All along this route of five hundred miles the people would read 
tons of leaflets, tracts, anything containing good, sound informa- 
tion and advice on common things. I could distribute all that 
anybody would give me." 

But why go on ? Here is a people, not inferior in capacity to 
any upon earth, of the best original stock, appearing for the first 
time as a controlling element in sixteen great States of the Repub- 
lic, in whose hands is the destiny of other millions just introduced 
to American citizenship. On them will depend the outcome of 
Southern affairs for the coming generation more than upon all the 
rest of the country. What an appeal to the patriotism, the justice, 
the Christian spirit, of the whole American people ! But alas for 
the sin, the shame, and the discouragement which stand between 
such a people and all that come to them in friendly co-operation { 
I live all summer in sight of money enough thrown to the dogs 
and to the devil to place on the ground, in any of these States, 
the agencies which their own noblest people are all ready to use 
for the public good. When the great Protestant churches, that still 
work at cross purposes along the border, learn the wisdom of 
Christian statesmanship, close up their ranks, and pour a stream 
of Northern money into this the most fruitful mission field on 
earth, there will be more hope of the coming of the kingdom for 
which their prayers go up day and night before the Lord. 

The conviction forces itself upon a careful observer of these 
States that the time has passed when any set of leaders, any polit- 
ical or ecclesiastical party, can solve the difficult problems now set 
before them. It is doubtful if the foremost men, North and South, 
who were once arrayed as enemies in war, can ever '' see eye to 
eye," or repose that confidence in each other without which all 
dealing with matters so delicate involves an ever-recurring exas- 
peration. Napoleon said, " When a great thing is to be done in 
public affairs, keep away from the leaders, and go to the people." 
« The people " that will finally bring peace, confidence, reconcilia- 
tion, through all our borders are the children and youth now being 
trained all over the land for the grandest effort of Christian admin- 
istration that ever confronted a generation of men. And the South- 
ern children on whom we are to largely depend, thirty years hence, 
for this glorious work of reconstruction and reconciliation are the 
boys and girls of this rising Third Estate and the Negroes, the 
youthful millions that now swarm this land of the South. The 



24 

best we can do is to hold things as good as they are, with the hope 
of making some little headway year by year against sectional 
prejudice, provincialism, and all the enemies of the new Republic. 
But greater than all other things is the work to which we are 
called, — the education of the head, the hand, and the heart of the 
twenty millions of Young America. Then, as Thomas Jefferson 
said, " if we educate the children aright, our descendants will be 
wiser than we, and many things impossible to us will be easy to 
them." 



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